"Sure the river empties into the Yukon, boys," said the Halfbreed. "'Tain't so far, either. If we can just make a few miles more we'll be all right."
At night, in my sleep, I was a prey to the strangest hallucinations. People I had known came and talked to me. They were so real that, when I awoke, I could scarce believe I had been dreaming. Berna came to me often. She came quite close, with great eyes of pity that looked into mine. Her lips moved.
"Be brave, my boy. Don't despair," she pleaded. Always in my dreams she pleaded like that, and I think that but for her I would have given up.
The Halfbreed was the most resolute of the party. He never lost his head. At times we others raved a little, or laughed a little, or cried a little, but the Halfbreed remained cool and grim. Ceaselessly he foraged for food. Once he found a nest of grouse eggs, and, breaking them open, discovered they contained half-formed birds. We ate them just as they were, crunched them between our swollen gums. Snails, too, we ate sometimes, and grass roots and moss which we scraped from the trees. But our greatest luck was the decayed grouse eggs.
Early one afternoon we were all resting by a camp-fire on which was boiling some moss, when suddenly the Halfbreed pointed. There, in a glade down by the river's edge, were a cow moose and calf. They were drinking. Stupidly we gazed. I saw the Halfbreed's hand go out as if to clutch the rifle. Alas! his fingers closed on the empty air. So near they were we could have struck them with a stone. Taking his sheath knife in his mouth, the Halfbreed started to crawl on his belly towards them. He had gone but a few yards when they winded him. One look they gave, and in a few moments they were miles away. That was the only time I saw the Halfbreed put out. He fell on his face and lay there for a long time.
Often we came to sloughs that we could not cross, and we had to go round them. We tried to build rafts, but we were too weak to navigate them. We were afraid we would roll off into the deep black water and drown feebly. So we went round, which in one case meant ten miles. Once, over a slough a few yards wide, the Halfbreed built a bridge of willows, and we crawled on hands and knees to the other side.
From a certain point our trip seems like a nightmare to me. I can only remember parts of it here and there. We reeled like drunken men. We sobbed sometimes, and sometimes we prayed. There was no word from Jim now, not even a whimper, as we half dragged, half carried him on. Our eyes were large with fever, our hands were like claws. Long sickly beards grew on our faces. Our clothes were rags, and vermin overran us. We had lost all track of time. Latterly we had been travelling about half a mile a day, and we must have been twenty days without proper food.
The Halfbreed had crawled ahead a mile or so, and he came back to where we lay. In a voice hoarse almost to a whisper he told us a bigger river joined ours down there, and on the bar was an old Indian camp. Perhaps in that place some one might find us. It seemed on the route of travel. So we made a last despairing effort and reached it. Indians had visited it quite recently. We foraged around and found some putrid fish bones, with which we made soup.
There was a grave set high on stilts, and within it a body covered with canvas. The Halfbreed wrenched the canvas from the body, and with it he made a boat eight feet in length by six in breadth. It was too rotten to hold him up, and he nearly drowned trying to float it, so he left it lying on the edge of the bar. I remember this was a terrible disappointment to us, and we wept bitterly. I think that about this time we were all half-crazy. We lay on that bar like men already dead, with no longer hope of deliverance.